inspo/anti-capitalism

[...] Colds are a referendum on how kind we can be to ourselves, how much we can let ourselves get away with, how small we can allow ourselves to be. They are also reminders of the large and overwhelming power of the systems that want us to be none of these things.

Every day there is some news story about someone who kept going to work through some horrible sickness, with a broken limb, through labor pains. We are supposed to find these stories inspiring. This particular tendency - to find the human willingness to break ourselves, the desperation that refuses kindness to one’s own body - to be somehow heroic, equated with both physical and moral strength, is not particular to our era. It is older and more insidious than that, deeper and harder to get at than the easy classification of millenial burnout. That burnout, or whatever name you want to give it, is real, but it is part of a vast and ancient idea that by destroying ourselves, by using ourselves up, we become holy and virtuous, guaranteed moral clarity, free from possible accusations of selfishness, clean as a bone and bathed in light. It is silly to think that there is nothing that does not reach back to an old and creaking and claw-fingered religion in our belief in the redemptive beauty of bearing up under suffering, of working through the pain.

I do think that millions of other teens (who, like me, never even what Sassy was, let alone that they should ask for a subscription for it) suffered without access to feminism. But there’s also the unique and poignant and enduring suffering of the women who become fodder for its formation and sustenance: postfeminism made them villains, and in so doing, made itself stronger.

I talk about this like postfeminism is a living entity, or a side in a war, with generals captaining it. Ideologies are never that coherent, that distinguishable, even if they do have people who benefit and profit from them. But there is no “outside” of ideology: We are all participants in a given ideology’s formation. Those who push against it can inadvertantly codify and reinforce its tenets. Those who ignore it nonetheless internalize it messages. The most effective and insidious of ideologies are those that make themselves invisible: it’s not a stance, it’s not political, it’s just the way things are.

We made fun of the world because of our ironclad belief that the world could not go on as it had before. With governments, schools, factories, police forces, brothels, militaries, armies, wars, judges, colonies, executives, madness, the misery of productive work, the seriousness of upper management (they were serious spirits, devoted, well-educated, powerful, full of experience and goodwill, sometimes criminals but always from the elite), and those speeches that incessantly repeated the obvious — reality as it was, reality as it couldn’t have been otherwise. (But with some “idealism” despite it all, you know, so we “wouldn’t lose hope.”) As well as hope — the claim that the worst had passed — they also still offered us some threats, so as to maintain a certain nervousness. The worst could return, we were told, if each of us didn’t do what he was made for; if, for example, the students stopped studying, the workers stopped working, women stopped having children, judges no longer passed judgment, and criminals ceased to commit the wrongdoing that makes us truly admire the police.

We didn’t believe them anymore. We no longer believed that the “biggest moments of our lives” were any different from ordeals — the competitions, the entrance exams, the medical exams to receive certificates, military service, decorations (or no decorations), citizenship (or no citizenship), careers (or no careers), the granting of credit (or no credit), et cetera. We no longer saw the need. All of a sudden, we no longer understood why the world had to be selective, that is to say, “meritocratic” — why selections were always prejudicial toward some and favorable toward others, why this should be a sign of good taste, talent, morals, progress. We understood nothing of “reality”; we felt it lied about our world.

And that was why we practiced sociology.

As Solow remarked when he received the Nobel Prize in economics in 1987, “One of the achievements of growth theory was to relate equilibrium growth to asset pricing under tranquil conditions.” In other words, private investment and distribution goals could be made objects of indirect planning if capital markets sent meaningful signals about social priorities. But “the hard part of disequilibrium growth is that we do not have — and it may be impossible to have — a really good theory of asset valuation under turbulent conditions.” High securities prices might signal that a corporation or municipality was satisfying public wants through its provision of sales or services — or that it had been thrown on the betting table or the chopping block. Profits and profitability in the capital market, it turned out, no longer told us anything about what kind of products and services the public wanted to consume and how. Maybe they never had.

The logic of the corporate enclosure of the public sphere is truly a neoliberal wonder to behold. As our power elite steadfastly refuses to acknowledge any broader responsibilities or demands than the mandate to continue amassing ever greater quarterly returns, the rest of us meekly pantomime an odd parody of consent of the governed by focusing inordinate attention on the ever-mythic specter of enlightened corporate political agency. At least, we’ll cry, Twitter and Facebook will de-platform that rabid lunatic Alex Jones—that’s accountability! Or, at a minimum, we’ll plead, Nike will cast Colin Kaepernick in their sneaker campaign—that’s solidarity! Or again, at the very least, we’ll point out, Amazon is bringing jobs to Long Island City—that’s leadership!

In our actually existing consensual reality, it of course matters not a whit that the culture-war sport of celebrating corporate censorship betrays any supposed democratic commitment to protecting the rights of all citizens on an equal basis, subtly charging both Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey with the power to decide what is and is not free speech. (“If Trump supporters don’t care about my speech, I don’t care about theirs,” a typical liberal disputant will snort on any given social-media platform, in full Frank Rich dudgeon.) And no matter that Nike, a Hydra of exploitative global supply chains with dubious labor practices, degrades Kaepernick’s protest of racialized police brutality to the inert and content-free mantra “Believe in something”—a funny-except-it’s-not late capitalist parody of empty advertising slogans. (“Say what you will, but Nike is taking a risk and making a powerful statement,” the contented liberal online commentariat will predictably tweet.) Amazon might hold entire cities hostage, dangling jobs in front of desperate mayors in exchange for public cash, private development contracts, and access to municipal security apparatuses, but “only New Yorkers could complain about getting 25,000 jobs,” Saturday Night Live’s Colin Jost scoffs.

The ruling class is always small, the lower orders large, even in a caste society. The poor always vastly outnumber the rich. The powerful are fewer than those they hold power over. Adult men hold superior status in almost all societies, though they are always outnumbered by women and children. Governments and religions sanction and uphold inequality, social rank, gender rank, and privilege, wholly or selecteively.

Most people, in most places, in most times, are of inferior status.

And most people, even now, even in "the free world," even in "the home of the free," consider this state of affairs, or certain elements of it, as natural, necessary, and unchangeable. They hold it to be the way it has always been and therefore the way it must be. This may be conviction or it may be ignorance; often it is both. Over the centuries, most people of inferior status have had no way of knowing that any other way of ordering society has existed or could exist - that change is possible. Only those of superior status have ever known enough to know that; and it is their power and privilege that would be at stake if the order of things were changed.

We cannot trust history as a moral guide in these matters, because history is written by the superior class, the educated, the empowered. But we have only history to go on, and observation of current events. On that evidence, revolt and rebellion are rare things, revolution extremely rare. In most times, in most places [...] They resist, yes; but their resistance is likely to be passive, or so devious, so much a part of daily behavior, as to be all but invisible.

When voices from the oppressed and hte underclass aer recorded, some are cries for justice, but most are expressions of patriotism, cheers for the king, vows to defend the fatherland, all loyally supporting the system that disenfranchises them and the people who profit from it.

[...]

Working men watch their company's CEO get paid three hundred times what they are paid, and grumble, but do nothing.

And just as the benefits of status presume the irrelevance of material inequality, so do its injustices. When you think your real problem is not that people have more money than you but that the people who have more money condescend to you, your problem is status. And when the solution to your problem is (as Sennett recommends) “mutual respect across the boundaries of inequality” (i.e., no more condescending), you have the imaginative world of neoliberalism, the world in which it’s OK for a few people to be rich and a lot of people to be poor but where it’s definitely not OK to make anyone feel bad about being poor, where it’s important above all to remember that there’s nothing wrong with being poor, and where, as Lee’s mom says, “being rich doesn’t make you a better person.” Indeed, the very thing wrong with the liberal elite—the thing, at least, that right-wing neoliberals like Wolfe and David Brooks are always taking them to task for—is that they think being rich does make them better people, or that being better people is what made them rich. But the reality, as Brooks puts it, is that in America, “nobody is better, nobody is worse.” Thus his famous comparison of the differences in American life to those in a high school cafeteria, divided into nerds, freaks, jocks, et cetera—they’re not classes, they’re “cliques.” Sure, the jocks have a higher status, but they’re not really better than the freaks, and just as the jocks shouldn’t be boastful, the freaks shouldn’t be resentful. The jocks shouldn’t be bullies; the freaks shouldn’t bring their Kalashnikovs to school.

On this model, then, class is turned into clique, and once the advantages of class are redescribed as the advantages of status, we get the recipe for what we might call right-wing egalitarianism: Respect the Poor. Which is also, as it turns out, the recipe for left-wing egalitarianism. Where the neoliberal right likes status instead of class, the neoliberal left likes culture, and the diversity version of Respect the Poor is Respect the Other. The Other is different from you and me but, just like Brooks says, neither better nor worse. That’s why multiculturalism could go from proclaiming itself a subversive politics to taking up its position as a corporate management technology in about ten minutes and without having to make the slightest adjustment in its most radical claims—Americans belong to many cultures, not one; all cultures are equal and should be equally respected. What CEO doesn’t prefer respecting his employees’ culture to paying them a living wage?

[...] demanding a return to the liberal world order—as leading scholars in international relations and international law have recently done—is an inadequate response. It obscures the ways that the illiberal backlash of our moment emerged out of the inequalities and hypocrisies of that very same system.

From our vantage point, the welfare world of the NIEO might appear utopian and unrealistic. But to dismiss the world that decolonization aspired to make is to refuse to reckon with the dilemmas we inherited from the end of empire. It is to evade our responsibility to build a world after empire. Our world, like Manley’s, is characterized by a battleground of widening inequality and ongoing domination. We cannot simply recreate the 1970s vision of a welfare world, but we can take from its architects the insight that building an egalitarian and postimperial world is the only route to true democratic self-governance.

I took my son to see it. I wanted him to know something of the origins and motivations of a structure of feeling that was something that I once felt deeply and to which I will remain in solidarity for the rest of my life. Let us admit, comrades, that we are a defeated people. There will be no second coming for us. And to try to remain in fidelity to something whose core myth lies in History is always to betray it anyway. The whole is to be begun again, and from the beginning.